Good Tory? End of story

Telegram editor Russell Wangersky maps out the new normal in federal and provincial politics in a devastating column titled “Lies, the new truths.”

Russell’s right on the solution to the problem:  people have stop accepting what they are told at face value especially when it comes directly from people involved and who, in certain instances, have a vested interest in the story.

Do that and, among other things, you might avoid the gigantic embarrassment of tweeting “I just heard from her. This is a patently false rumour” only to have to suck the whole thing back minutes later when the thing turned out to be patently true. 

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Traffic with no secret appointments (Mar 7–Mar 11)

1. Dunderdale boosts Tory support from last Williams poll
2. MOU PIFO 2
3. The importance of education:  education and the economy
4. Tories at 44.5%;  UND at 39%:  government pollster
5. Patronage, pure and simple
6. The secret of life in Newfoundland and Labrador
7. Personal bankruptcies in Newfoundland and Labrador
8. AbitibiBowater, Democracy and the public interest
9. Drilling in Gulf is dangerous and unmanageable
10. Labrador Hydro:  That 70s Show

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Getting more women involved in elected politics

Take a gander at this clip from a recent edition of CTV’s Power Play with Don Martin. It features an interview with Nancy Peckford, executive director of Equal Voice.

Nancy covers some of the issues involved at the federal level in getting more women in elected politics.

 

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AbitibiBowater, Democracy and the Public Interest

There’s a new commentary from an Ottawa-based think tank on the AbitibiBowater expropriation.  The commentary is basically Brian Lee Crowley’s presentation to the Commons standing committee on international trade.

You can read the full text here. and below are four highlighted points:

“1.  The Chapter 11 provisions of NAFTA provide no bar whatsoever to Canadian
governments acting in the public interest through law and regulation, but they
properly require that the government pay the legitimate costs associated with
their decisions, including compensating parties whose property is confiscated or
nationalized.

2.  Paying compensation for expropriation is a matter of basic fairness and is a
fundamental principle in Canadian law, not just NAFTA.

3.  As a country with huge investments in other jurisdictions, we benefit enormously from such investor protections in other countries, and failure to apply
such protections domestically would damage our credibility and harm Canadian
investors

4.  The AbitibiBowater case points up a damaging inconsistency in Canada’s constitutional and legal framework whereby Canada has the treaty-making power
and, therefore, is responsible to ensure that we meet our treaty obligations; but
provinces are not bound to respect the NAFTA provisions. A mechanism can and
should be found to oblige provinces to take responsibility for their decisions and
prevent them from passing the costs of provincial decisions on to the federal taxpayer.”

There’s also a version of the presentation in a Troymedia piece called “Provinces behaving badly and what can be done about it”:

Governments in Canada have the right to take your house, farm, or factory, but the requirements of fairness and the Canadian democratic tradition normally subject that power to limits. Governments must compensate you if they take your property. Moreover they don’t get to set the price unilaterally; it must be done by an arm’s length agency and be subject to judicial review.

It was Newfoundland and Labrador’s decision to ignore these rules of decent behaviour that created the damage that federal taxpayers must now clean up.

If there is any kind of a democratic deficit in the AbitibiBowater decision, surely it is here: in a genuine democracy, voters should have to face the true costs of their decisions so that they can make a balanced assessment of the pros and cons. The current arrangements force innocent federal taxpayers, who have no hand in choosing provincial governments in other provinces, to nonetheless pay the tab for those governments’ bad behaviour. And that is practically the textbook definition of a perverse incentive.

 

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Labrador hydro: That 70s Show reruns

Listening to Leo Abbass on CBC radio Wednesday afternoon, you could almost imagine you were back in the 1970s. 

Harry Hibbs. 

Banana seat bicycles. 

Joan Morrissey. 

All around the circle.

John Crosbie with muttonchops. 

The whole shooting match.

Radio Noon had Abbass, the mayor of Happy Valley-Goose Bay, as the guest for its hour-long call-in show. He was talking up Muskrat Falls, the economic disaster doing business as Danny Williams’ memorial to Hisself. 

Some guy called in to point out that after construction ended, there’d only be a handful of jobs left keeping an eye on the gauges as all the power streamed off somewhere other than Labrador.  Abbass disagreed.  After all, he reasoned, there’d be all that cheap power available to lure some industry or other and hundreds of jobs to boot.

Flick your mind back 40 years - if it goes back that far -  and you probably remember another bunch of politicians who said exactly the same thing. That was the big idea for Churchill Falls back to the 1950s when Joe Smallwood supposedly first dreamed his first dream of immortality: cheap power for aluminum plants and lumber mills. 

Ditto Baie d’Espoir on the island.  That one was supposed to support not one, not two, not even three or four major new industries.  By the time Joe Smallwood and his crew got around to that one, their cheap power was supposed to sustain seven new industries.

Seven.

With one blow.

Paper mill.

Refinery.

Petrochemical plant. 

Hockey stick factory.  Betcha never heard that one before.

Phosphorus plant.

A bunch of new industries.

Hundreds of new jobs.

All with cheap power.

2 mills, even less than at Churchill Falls.

Not even the pretext of trying to make the thing break even.

Just like the aluminum smelter in Labrador.  That old chestnut is still good for all sorts of mileage even from the most highly educated members of our population.

What do the hydroqueen, at least one recent premier, the odd economist, and now maybe a mayor have in common? 

Your first two guesses don’t count but if you get it right, you could win the chance to cut the ribbon at the Grand Opening of the latest Great Unnamed Industry to Save Newfoundland (and Labrador). 

The gigantic load of horse manure is that much a part of our culture that when they get done with the 60th anniversary of the Fisheries Broadcast, CBC should celebrate 60 years of aluminum smelter rumours in Newfoundland and Labrador. 

Oh dear.  Was that sarcasm? 

There’ll probably be a Telegram column now defending the honour of this beloved fairy tale.  If two university professors get a quote in the paper noting its turd-like aroma, you can bet there’ll be at least two columns, one of which will point out that the two learneds are – whispers – you know.

That way.

What way?

You know:

Different.

You mean mainlanders?

YES!  For Gawd’s sake.

And as such, they are unfit to comment at all on our revered customs and venerated observances.

Like Screech-ins and gravel-pit camping, both of which have been practiced in the province (and maybe even Labrador) since John Cabot’s time at least. 

Surely, that long.

And they are definitely not – respectively – a cheesy 1970s marketing gimmick by the liquor corporation and a relic of the post-war era when the government actually had enough money to build roads for people to drive cars on.

And it isn’t just this Labrador hydro power stuff.

Take a look at municipal politics.  Some poor sod who went into a coma around the time of the Canada Summer Games in 1977 and who sprang back to life this week would look at the TV and wonder what the frig was going on.  Some woman from city council with a hat on then talking about being verbally beaten up by her fellow councillors when his lights went out. Now that the lights are back on,  he sees some woman from city council with a hat on…

You get the idea.

Then there’s the fishery.

Only difference is that this cartoon today would have the one guy with four hands covering ears and eyes and with both feet in his mouth.

Since 2003, it’s like the province – and Labrador - is one giant trip back to the 70s.

 

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Personal Bankruptcies in Newfoundland and Labrador

The following chart shows personal bankruptcies in Newfoundland and Labrador from 1991 to 2009.

Data is from Statistics Canada, compiled by the Newfoundland and Labrador Statistics Agency.

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The secret of life in Newfoundland and Labrador

The secret of life and comedy is timing.

In this case, the secret of life in Newfoundland and Labrador would be the curious coincidence in timing of a conference to discuss ways of getting more women involved in the oil and gas industry with the leak that the provincial government passed over qualified female candidates in the industry for a job at the offshore regulatory board in favour of pure patronage.

As much as this sort of old-fashion pork may be the nature of life under the provincial Conservatives, it isn’t very funny.

What it does make clear, though, is that anyone hoping to increase the number of women involved in the province’s offshore industry is going to have a long way to go.

First you’ve got to get rid of these very old, very backward ideas about patronage and entitlements and get government to make appointments based on merit first.

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A trading nation: 2011 update

Newfoundland and Labrador exports more to the United States than any other foreign location.  This is a point made in a 2005 post but more recent numbers tell just exactly how important a role the United States plays.

In 2008, total exports peaked at more than $10 billion.  Two years later, exports to the United States have only recovered to slightly more than it was in 2005;  that’s about $6.4 billion.

In 2010, the next largest export destination was Germany at $734 million, then China at $704 million.  It’s a big slide to the fourth largest export destination – the Netherlands – and $120 million in exports in 2010.  When you look at those figures, consider how foolhardy it was to ignore free trade negotiations with the European Union.

On the flip side, the largest import source for Newfoundland and Labrador remains Iraq at $1.8 billion.  Next is Russia at $595 million followed by the United States at $324 million.  The fourth largest import source is Venezuela.

If you are trying to figure out those import sources, think about the largest export destination.  Think of oil and you are in the right neighbourhood.  Iraq is the chief source of heavy sour crude for Come by Chance and on the flip side, all that refined product is destined for the Untied States.

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Drilling in Gulf is dangerous and unmanageable

Marilyn Clark, a Magdalen Islander studying at Memorial University, argues that oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of St. Lawrence is unmanageable and dangerous in the current regulatory context.

She writes in the Montreal Gazette:

What will governance look like with four offshore regulators in less than 500 kilometres of water? If we believe that Quebec and Newfoundland will cooperate to prioritize citizens, we are kidding ourselves. They have already sliced moving water down the middle to conduct their environmental assessments.

The lack of a harmonized approach for a single body of water will permit pollution without political accountability; the citizens of one province will have no way of holding the governments of other provinces responsible.

Why is the government gambling with the assets of my region, while the renewable resources of southwest Nova Scotia and British Columbia are protected? The Gulf only fully flushes itself out once a year. If drill cuttings, waste water and chronic spills are the new ingredients of our Gulf, we will be importing our lobster from the Caribbean and our crab from Asia. How can I be expected to invest in my region when I know that the offshore regulatory framework is so flawed that oil companies monitor themselves?

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The importance of education: education and the economy

The National Post’s Kelly McParland offered a colourful chart last November comparing a number of things, including federal transfers to provinces (on a per person basis), provincial gross domestic product and the amount spent per person on education.

There are also some bullet points. 

One stood out:

Newfoundland has strong investment, high GDP, generous transfers, yet still has the country’s highest unemployment and spends very little on education. Might those last two be related?

They might well be related. 

But then again, it is hard to know for sure given that the figures for per capita education spending, for example,  are from 2006 and unemployment is from 2010. There’s no indication why the figures are from different years but they are;  it’s not like the information is secret or otherwise unavailable. 

As for employment rates, in October 2010 it was around 13%  - according to the Post chart - and in October 2006, it was 14%. The participation rate is up slightly in 2010 compared to 2006 (61% versus 58-59%).

Still, it’s hard to escape the idea that there is a connection between education and economic performance.

Consider this some food for thought.

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Dunderdale boosts Tory support from last Williams poll: government pollster (revised numbers) #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Corporate Research Associates issued a correction to its latest polling numbers for Newfoundland and Labrador on Monday and the result is truly startling.

The Conservatives under Kathy Dunderdale have the support of 56% of voters compared to 51% for the Tories under Danny Williams in November 2010.

Sure her personal popularity may be less than Danny’s but she’s managed to pull the Tories out of their downward slide in Danny’s last three months that took them from 61% in August to 51% in November.  Dunderdale’s started the Tories back on the path to the stars and without doing very much of anything for the past three months except fend off a weak challenge to her leadership by Brad Cabana.

Not surprisingly, the Conventional media are following along with CRA’s news release and their own conventional wisdom to make the poll numbers fit what they think the numbers should say.  They are saying that Dunderdale is not as strong as Danny but she is still pretty big.

But as absurd as it may seem, the CRA numbers really put Kathy ahead of her old patron.

According to CRA’s revised numbers, undecideds dropped from 31% to 23% in the three months or so Danny’s been gone.  The unfiltered, undistorted CRA numbers show Tory support went from 51% in November with Danny as leader to 56% with Kathy Dunderdale.

Both the change in party support for the Tories and the change in undecideds is outside the margin of error (4..9 percentage points)

“How could this be?” you are likely asking.

Call it the mother of all typos.

The original news release included this sentence:

Those with no stated preference included those who were undecided (18%), do not plan to vote (3%), or refuse to state a preference (18%).

That adds up to 39%.

The table at the end of the news release gave the figure as 23%.  Apparently that second 18% was only supposed to be two percent.

Not 18.

2.

Big difference.

It’s a bit of a head scratcher as to how someone could mistakenly type “18” instead of “2” and how the release could get out the door with such a glaring error.

Your humble e-scribbler took the figures in the text of the release in largest part since they were consistent, across the board with a similar poll done by NTV/Telelink in February.  Those are the figures used in an earlier post. 

Now what we are left with is a poll that mirrors Telelink in every way except in Conservative support and the level of undecided/no answer and will not votes.  The differences are hardly inconsequential. 

What this cock-up really should be is a reminder that CRA’s poll reporting does contain some rather glaring problems.  For instance, CRA routinely distorts the results of its polls by presenting only the results for decided voters. You can see the effect of that misrepresentation by charting the results as a share of all responses, not just the “decideds”. This chart is taken from post last December on CRA’s fourth quarter poll.

According to CRA’s version, the Conservative party’s support remains in the mid 70s. What doesn’t get noticed is that the “undecided” category has gone from the teens to 31% in November 2010.  Now it’s dropped again to 23% in the most recent poll.

You’ll also see in the middle of that chart another clue that something is seriously wrong with CRA’s polls.  That flat line in the middle would be a period of three consecutive quarterly polls where the difference in Tory support was apparently less than one percent. Those interested in a more detailed discussion can find it in an older post:  There’s a fairly lengthy post that discusses most of the major problems with CRA polling:  “How the Tories get 28% more votes thanks to CRA”..

For the first time in a long while, CBC has added a few questions to CRA’s quarterly polling.  Ostensibly they give new information, but essentially, CBC just gives a variation on the basic horse race questions. One of the CBC questions even repeats the same flawed question format of “mostly” and “completely” and equally extreme negative choices.  On other occasions, incidentally, CRA has asked a typical five point Likert scale (strong and moderate positives and negatives with a neutral) and reported the results as “completely” or “mostly” as appropriate. 

What is the difference, after all, between completely and mostly, compared to completely and somewhat?  think about it for a second and you’ll get the point.

What’s missing in all the questions is the sort of stuff that would give any indication of what Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are concerned about.  What pollsters typically do is ask what issues are of concern to their respondents.  Then they might ask voters to rate party performance on each question.  Sometimes they might leave out the party support questions so as not to unduly influence the responses, but with or without it, one can get a much better sense of what potential voters are thinking.

Instead of some insight, one gets absurd responses.  For example, when asked whether Williams departure will influence party choice (the question itself is oddly worded, by the way), 34% said they were less likely to vote Conservative while 30% said they are more likely. 

Huh?

Exactly.

And don’t forget the Conservatives supposedly enjoy 73% voter support  - using CRA’s own method of reporting - with only 18% actually undecided in their party choice.

And as a last point, let’s just remember this basic point.  CRA polls eligible voters.  They don’t screen for usual voters or regular voters.  They just survey all eligible voters. That means you need to compare their poll results, including UND/DK/NA with the actual poll results for any given election.

In their Fall 2007 quarterly survey, CRA put the combined no answer/will not vote/undecided at a mere 18%. The actual result on polling day was 38%.  CRA’s quarterly polls typically show that the “will not vote” category is less than five percent.

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White Rose field may get GBS

According to the Telegram, the White Rose partners are looking at using a concrete gravity base structure or GBS.

The concrete well-head unit would support a drilling rig.  Oil from the wellhead would be pumped to the existing SeaRose floating production, storage and offloading vessel and from there to tankers to take it to market.

“We’re looking at a whole range of different concepts,” said Paul McCloskey, Husky’s East Coast vice-president

“One of the opportunities that we are considering is the installation of a very skinny GBS.

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Tories at 44.5%, UND at 39%: government pollster #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Double-down Update:

• CRA's issued a correction that its UND category was 23% as shown in the table not 39% shown in the text.  That's one mother of a typo and therefore that's worth a whole new post, coming later.
• CBC apparently piggybacked on this one and has some specific questions of its own coming later on Monday evening.  That would warrant a separate post on its own.
• New post:  “Dunderdale boosts Tory support from last Williams poll”

Original Post begins...

Support for the ruling provincial Conservatives under Kathy Dunderdale is at 44.5% compared to 61% last August under Danny Williams according to a Corporate Research Associates quarterly poll released on Monday.  The results match almost exactly with a recent NTV/Telelink poll that put support for the province’s Tories at 44.3%.

Undecided, including those who refused to answer and those who do not plan to vote is at 39%, up eight percentage points from CRA’s November 2010 poll.  NTV/Telelink reported 37.9% of its respondents didn’t know how they might vote, wouldn’t state a preference or indicated they would not vote.

And that’s where the real story is for these polling numbers.  According to CRA’s polls, support for the provincial Conservatives started to slide during the last three months of Danny Williams’ leadership.  His abrupt departure didn’t stop the slide.

What’s worse, the margin of error for this poll is 4.9%.  That means there is a possible variation in those numbers of almost 10 percentage points.  Given that the Tory and UND number is less than 10% is it possible that more people are undecided or won’t state a preference than are actually indicating they will vote for the provincial Conservatives.

There are problems with the way CRA presents its figures.  For example, they show party choice for decided voters.  This is highly misleading as can be seen in the party vote numbers. The obvious decline in Tory support vanishes completely because of the way CRA reports its figures.

Still, if you look at the numbers, understand what you are seeing, and can check them against a second set of figures like NTV/Telelink, the results can be dramatically different than what you will see reported by conventional media.

These poll results from two different firms don’t  mean the Tories will lose the next general election.  What they do show is an electorate which is sufficiently uncomfortable that they will not state a clear support for the ruling party.  The fall general election could be up for grabs, depending on what the Conservatives and the opposition parties do over the next three to seven months.

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MOU PIFO 2

For those who haven’t watched it yet, the raw video of fisheries minister Clyde Jackman’s news conference on the fisheries restructuring report  is worth watching in its entirety. 

Jackman and his staff apparently tried to rush the reporters and overwhelm them.  Instead of the usual background briefing on the report and a lengthy introductory statement, Jackman simply sat down, blathered out some perfunctory thanks and quickly asked for the first question.

What happens next is both beautiful and horrifying.  The beauty is in the elegance of reporters’ questions, especially CBC’s David Cochrane:  simple, focused and sharp despite working with the considerable handicap of not having read the lengthy report ahead of time.  They fillet Jackman’s credibility in living colour and lay out for anyone who cares to see it both the solution to the fisheries crisis and the only serious obstacle to it, namely the provincial government itself.

The horrifying bit is Jackman, his finger sometimes point here and there while he desperately tried to say something that did not sound asinine.  What Jackman fell back on repeatedly were a bunch of stock phrases about the need to treat the industry like an industry or the “ask” for a whole lot of money.  The result – the horrifying bit – comes with the realization that either the cabinet is completely fractured over fisheries reform and cannot figure out what to do or that they are agreed that the fishery must simply be allowed to collapse of its own accord.

There simply isn’t another alternative for Jackman’s performance.  After all, you don’t have to watch too much of his squirming to get the feeling that Jackman was busily clicking his heels under the table and muttering “There’s no place like home, Toto” under his breath.

In all likelihood, the current cabinet, like previous cabinets simply can’t get a position they can all agree on.   That would explain why Jackman never could define what he actually wanted instead of the report in front of him.  That’s why he relied on stock phrases that themselves meant nothing.  And as a result, one gets the idea pretty clearly that the provincial government simply doesn’t know what it wants, except to know that they did not want to accept the report in front of him and all its implications.

What Jackman did mention one too many times for comfort was the idea that some people think time will take care of the whole thing.  In other words, in an industry dominated by people rapidly approaching retirement, most of the people who would be “restructured” will simply leave the industry on their own if nothing else happens. He also talked about signs that prices might be climbing again soon, perhaps another clue as to what some in the provincial government might be hoping for.

Cochrane asked if the entire MOU process was now a waste of time.  Four and a half years of work at building a consensus in the industry seems to have come to naught. Not at all, said Jackman since now everyone has a study that describes exactly how bad things really are; now people can talk about solutions.

People have been talking about solutions for years.  This report was supposed to be the first step to action, not to further talk.  For anyone willing to pay attention, comments this past week made it pretty clear that both processors and fish harvesters are done with talking.  They want some action.

That leaves the provincial government in a terrible spot:  there is an election in October. The fishery is a gigantic political problem affecting many districts on the island and in Labrador. The governing party not only has no idea what to do about the fishery, they cannot even develop a strategy to effectively manage the controversy.

And what’s more, they have no distractions, no foreign demons, no bits of absurd political theatre to use to distract people.

What a terrible place to be in.

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Traffic without patronage, Feb 28 to Mar 3

1. HMV
2. Provgov pollster seeds ground for bad news
3. A cheaper, green alternative to Muskrat Falls
4. MOU PIFO
5. Are city councillors paid enough?
6. Patronage, pure and simple
7. CB city council by-election down to five
8. Birds of a Conservative feather
9. Court docket now online
10. 35% unsure of Dunderdale

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Charlie or Gaddafi-Duck?

From the Mirror, a list of comments.

You have to pick whether the line came from Charlie Sheen or Muammar Qadafhi.

Then try the Vanity Fair version.

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So who would be the deputy Max?

The Atlantic Accord Implementation Act, 1987 allows for the appointment of two vice-chairs at the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board.

But with two vice-chairs, who will be the board member to fill in for chief executive officer Max Ruelokke if he is away for a vacation or is otherwise not on the job?

Here’s what section 14 says:

The Board shall designate a member to act as Chairman of the Board during any absence or incapacity of the Chairman or vacancy in the office of Chairman, and that person, while acting as Chairman, has and may exercise all of the powers and perform all of the duties and functions of the Chairman.

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Patronage, pure and simple

Take out a piece of paper and a pencil and it wouldn’t take you very long to write down the names of men and women from the private or public sector who are qualified by their experience to take on the job of vice-chair at the federal-provincial agency that regulates the offshore industry.

Limit the list to just women and you’d still have a fair number of very capable people.

Elizabeth Matthews  - Danny Williams’ former communications director  - wouldn’t be on the list anywhere.

She wouldn’t be left out of consideration because she isn’t smart or capable in her own right.  It’s just that she lacks the experience necessary for the job.

It’s that simple.

By proposing to appoint the unqualified Matthews as vice chair of the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, Kathy Dunderdale has shown exactly the same tendency to propose unqualified people for very important jobs her patron had.  Andy Wells, the former mayor of St. John’s is perhaps the best example of that. 

However, Andy Wells is surely not the only example of an appointment that left many people scratching their heads in bewilderment or – as again with the Matthews appointment – setting teeth on edge in the province’s oil industry. They might have understood appointing Danny Williams’  former chief of staff who is also looking for a new gig now that Williams has left politics.  At least, Brian Crawley had work experience in the industry on the Hibernia project.  For the past couple of weeks though, the movers and shakers in the local oil patch are shaking their heads at the sort of appointment one might find in some banana republic rather than in a Canadian jurisdiction that aspires to be among the world leaders in regulating a complex industry.

Conservatives are trotting out the idea that Matthews will somehow change the communications practices at the board because of her work experience.  The board already has a competent and experience public relations practitioner, for one thing and Matthews certainly isn’t needed for that.  What’s more important to realise in that regard is that, as others have pointed out, Matthews helped to create and sustain one of the most secretive political machines in the province’s history. 

What both the provincial [and] federal governments ought to have done in this case is what the position warrants:  an open competition in which the successful candidate is appointed based on merit.  That’s how such a senior position ought to be filled.  That’s how they filled the chairman’s job a few years.  The process wound up a mess [in that case] simply because Danny Williams intervened to try and foist his blatantly unqualified whim onto a process that was supposed to be driven by merit. Just because the law says appointments like this are made by cabinet does not mean that they must be handed out as patronage plums.

Merit ought to count for much more that it does with the current provincial administration.

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*   Corrections in square brackets

Birds of a Conservative feather

Not surprisingly at all, the federal Conservatives now call it the “Harper government”. 

From 2003 to 2010 in Newfoundland and Labrador, it was always the Williams government, too.

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From the extraordinarily stupid comments file

The Western Star -  the newspaper that previously blamed the opposition Liberals for Danny Williams’ expropriation fiasco – now thinks that Liberals should just go away and let the Conservatives do as they see fit.

Is that just an extraordinarily stupid comment, even for the Western Star, or what?

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